“Well, I've been in the city for 30 years and I've never once regretted being a nasty, greedy, cold-hearted, avaricious money-grubber... er, Conservative!” - Monty Python's Flying Circus, Season 2, Episode 11, How Not To Be Seen

Tuesday, August 17, 2010

This 9/11 Mosque Stuff just keeps coming

In a way I'm tired about blogging about it, and in another, this is something I legitimately feel passionately about. So there you go. And now that Obama has weighed in on it, you can expect another week of articles. Today's article comes from Michael Medved.

No, all Muslims aren’t the same, but all Mosques are the same, in one important sense at least: they all celebrate Islam. They exalt its teachings, traditions, history and adherents.

Yes, American Muslims enjoy a right to celebrate their faith in their mosques.

But it remains wildly inappropriate to celebrate and glorify one particular faith at the scene of one of the most notorious crimes in its history.

Lets take these in reverse order.

1. If someone wanted to build a Christian Church in the exact same spot, Medved would have nothing to say about it.

2. The first bit essentially proclaims that any Mosque is the same as the Mosque that Osama bin Ladin worships at (assuming he gets to go to a Mosque atall). Which is another way of saying that all Islam is responsibile for what Osama bin Ladin did; a point Medved makes clear later on his article.

The insistence on creating such a building on such a place sends a dishonest, disturbing message: that Islam itself bears no special connection to the attacks of 9/11, and that the Mosque’s planners feel no shame over their co-religionists who planned and executed those crimes.

What a poorly constructed paragraph - Medved suggests that the Cordoba Centers funders are putting forward two lies. The first lie is that Islam bears no special connection to the attacks of 9/11; presumably Medved believes this to be a lie.

The second "lie" is that the Mosque's founders feel no shame over their co-religionists attack on 9/11. But presumably Medved actually believes that they don't feel any shame; he probably believes they should, but they don't. All Muslims should feel terribly guilty to be Muslims all the time, and certainly whenever they are in New York City, near Ground Zero.